


All The Lord's Men

by McFearo



Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Edér and Vela and the Steward have a lot of emotions to sort through, Gen, POV Multiple, Post Hylea ending for PoE 1, and self-indulgent Found Family themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-11-13 21:24:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18039311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/McFearo/pseuds/McFearo
Summary: Just the same he’s gone and donned the very armor he’d expected to die in 20 years ago, 6 years ago, and he’s run off to try and set it right again.Above all else, Edér’s just not sure how he’ll manage that without an army, a Godhammer, or Tray.But one thing he knows for certain, it’s better than sitting at home in Dyrford and counting his losses like bodies on a hanging tree until he lays down and dies.Or, a number of things that happened while the Watcher was in the In-Between.





	1. the end of the world through a child's eyes

**Author's Note:**

> This came about mostly by accident after thinking about what the opening sequence of Deadfire must have been like for everyone other than the Watcher -- and, to a lesser extent, a small need to tie up a loose end re: wichts in the Hylea ending.
> 
> Featuring my previous Watcher, Giancarlo, who's found a new role in the story as my canon Watcher's mentor-father-figure and Vela's de facto grandpa.

Vela is sitting in the chapel, and she’s drawing a picture of her dog with the chalk colors her Grandpa brought her.

 

Her Grandpa is sitting criss-cross in front of the altar and he lights the incense that makes her nose tickle. It smells sweet. She likes the incense because it smells like the same way Grandpa's robes always smell when he picks her up, because he's always lighting the incense.

 

He says a prayer, and Vela listens a little to the big deep sound his voice makes without really listening to the words, because she’s quite busy really, and she kicks her feet back and forth off the ledge she's sitting on, with her back against the big skeleton statue.

 

Grandpa brought her drawings from the children he’s been minding in Dyrford. He told her about them a little, and he said that he told them about her, too. They used to be wichts, he said, and she knows what that is, but they're getting better now, because Papa put their souls back in, and then he (Grandpa) and their Mother found them in the woods and took the animal souls out so they weren't mixed up anymore, and now they’re minding them at the house in Dyrford.

 

They drew Vela some pictures of a tower, and also some pigs and her Uncle Edér, and their house, and their Mother. Grandpa brought the pictures to Vela, so now she’s drawing pictures of the things in Caed Nua for him to give the children who used to be wichts when he goes back.

 

Her Papa said that maybe sometime when things aren’t as busy at the castle and all the robbers on the road are all dead, he’ll take her to Dyrford too, and then she can see Uncle Edér and she can play with the children.

 

There are  _ not  _ enough children at Caed Nua.

 

Satisfied with her drawing of her dog -- which she hasn’t noticed yet that she’s given five legs -- Vela sets it down and pulls a clean sheet of parchment so she can try to draw her Grandpa in big loopy shapes. She draws herself holding his hand, but very tiny for scale because her Grandpa is the biggest man in the world. Vela can sit her whole butt on just one of his shoulders, and then she's taller than everyone, even the Steward.

 

Maybe she should have drawn herself on his shoulder, she thinks, and she sets down the unfinished picture and starts over.

 

“--from life to death to life again, blessed be. An ending,” her Grandpa is saying in his big voice.

 

Vela peeks up at her Grandpa to eyeball the shapes of his horns for her drawing. They're two big red curls on the top of his head that knock the tops of door frames when he doesn't duck enough, which usually happens when he tries to read books and walk at the same time like she’s told him not to do about ten thousand times. She's almost got it, the shapes of them, but the stone under her butt feels fuzzy and it's weird, so she gets distracted.

 

The candles are flickering a lot, and the stone feels fuzzy, or… buzzy. Like Grandpa's chest when she smooshes her head against it when he's talking.

 

“The floor is buzzy. It’s weird,” Vela tells her Grandpa, because he probably ought to know. He must have felt it too when he was sitting though, because he’s standing up on his feet now and he's looking at the candles on the altar. They’re shaking like crazy, like they’ll fall over.

 

The buzzing is getting harder now, and it feels weird and Vela doesn't like it, so she hops off of the statue and stands up too.

 

The buzzing feeling goes up through her feet, like when they fall asleep, but also the statue is starting to wobble back and forth a bit and she steps away and watches it because it looks like it might fall.

 

“Grandpa everything’s shaking. I don't like it,” Vela tells her Grandpa in a higher voice than she meant to, because it's scaring her. She doesn't know why it's doing that but it’s definitely, definitely not supposed to, she definitely knows that much. It’s definitely bad.

 

A candle falls off of the altar. The fire goes out on the way down, but it gets white wax all over the floor, but her Grandpa doesn't try to grab it. He's looking at her, and he's saying something that sounds like made up words, but she knows it’s the prayers he does to call Berath, but it's hard to hear because she can hear the buzzing in the walls.

 

He's walking over to her, and he's very fast because he has big legs, but he's walking very especially fast right now, and that's how she can tell for sure that she was right and something is very bad.

 

There's a loud noise outside the chapel wall, like gravel crunching under her shoes but big and loud, like gravel crunching under really huge shoes.

 

It scares her so bad she's crying and reaching up for her Grandpa when picks her up under her armpits. She holds onto her drawing and her chalks really tight to not drop them and it smudges rainbows onto her Grandpa's black robes when she tucks into his chest.

 

His arms are so big they wrap around her whole body and he squeezes her tight and she almost feels a little less scared, but she's not done crying. She feels a thump through her whole body when her Grandpa sits down on his knees really hard.

 

Even with her ear smooshed into his chest she almost can't hear his big voice over the shaking and the crunching. The words still don't make sense but she’s heard them a few times, enough she can almost say them along with him.

 

Vela squeezes her eyes shut tight and buries her face in her Grandpa's robes that smell like the incense, but in the corner of her eye she can still see a smudge of bright white light flashing up around them. It's so bright it goes right through her eyelids.

 

Grandpa says the words big and loud, yelling them over the noise, but she can barely hear. It's just a big noise in his chest, but not as big as the noise in the floor.

 

There's a big, loud CRACK when the chapel crunches in around them.


	2. twenty five miles to the hole in the earth

_ Breathe. _

 

The command bursts like a cannon shell in Edér's head and he sucks in a breath, not sure where it came from. He hadn't even realized he'd stopped breathing.

 

The Midwife's wrist jangles as she pulls it away from his arm, but he doesn't look at her. His eyes are caught on the thing looming on the horizon.

 

She'd found him drinking with some of the boys from Eska's mill, listening with a guilty wince to a joke about an orlan barmaid. He'd have laughed once, but these days when those jokes come around he half expects Hiravias to burst in through the door, teeth bared, and shout them all down to half an orlan's height.

 

Edér had had a sheepish objection on the tip of his tongue when they all realized the Midwife was standing there, and that did the job for him.

 

He hadn't seen her walk up, and a passing thought had said he usually never does. But then, much like the thought he sometimes has about why it is, he wonders, that everyone only ever calls her the Midwife… it had just slipped by, like trying to hold a wriggling fish.

 

He'd opened his mouth to give her a polite hello, but was stopped by the wild look in her eyes.

 

“Something is coming,” she'd said. Slow as anything, dreamy as the creek winding out through the woods, for all that she’d looked like anyone other than a Watcher might look at a ghost. “Something stirs, Mayor. Please…”

 

About six years ago, anyone had said something that cryptic to him and then stumbled, staring, backwards towards the door like she did then, he’d have just smiled and nodded amicably until she was satisfied enough to go back to whatever her particular brand of crazy got her up to on an average day.

 

Then he’d spent a year among Watchers, and some time since then with them too, off and on. He’s seen enough he knows better now, than to pretend the strangeness of the world isn’t his problem. Sooner or later it  _ makes  _ itself his problem. Better not to let it gather too much momentum before it crashes headlong into him.

 

And so he’d followed her out into the street in the dusk light, passing clouds of fireflies up from the brush, and he’d stood beside the Midwife on the footbridge and had a good look around at all of nothing.

 

The Midwife had stared unerringly northwest without so much as blinking, muttering under her breath with her hands clutched to her chest, little bells tinkling with the shaking of her wrists. But the minutes ticked by with nothing more exciting than the splash of a trout leaping out of the creek below, probably after a low-flying dragonfly.

 

Edér had begun to sigh and groan, embarrassed at himself, at his paranoia and his gullibility. He’d been so afraid to bet against the odds that a virtual stranger’s rambling was anything more than standard run-of-the-mill crazy, even just  _ once,  _ that he’d gone and wasted the better part of fifteen minutes standing on the bridge and looking like an idiot.

 

Before he could ask her gently if she’d like to go talk with the Berathians up the road for help, seeing as they were halfway there already and church folks tend to be awful helpful, he’d heard the distant thundercrack and looked up.

 

In hindsight, that must have been right about when he stopped breathing.

 

He recognizes the damn thing. Of course he does. But for a long, long minute there, he didn’t.

 

It’s strange. All the times Edér had walked down into the bowels of Od Nua’s endless godsdamn paths -- every time the caverns came twisting around to that adra monstrosity again and revealed a hand, a face, a foot -- he’d half expected with his heart in his throat for the statue to move.

 

He’d braced himself for it, again and again, with a mantra of  _ if that thing budges one little inch, I’m gonna be so  _ pissed.

 

The thought had kept him awake for hours even after long days of spiders, spiders, and more spiders, camping out three, four, five hours’ walk beneath where any sane man should have turned around and made for daylight again.

 

It was so big, was the thing, and they were so little.

 

His sense of his own poor luck and short life expectancy told him it was  _ bound  _ to just up and move, and there’d be nothing they could do about it, and the inevitability of it kept his guts in knots until he was back to squinting in the sun. It never had moved, of course, but he’d expected it every second. Averted his eyes from its fingers when they stood in its open palm, deep in the earth.

 

He hadn’t wanted to see them move. If they would curl in and crush them all to jelly, he hadn’t wanted to see it coming.

 

For all that waiting and expectation, for a long minute he hadn’t recognized it now that it  _ is _ moving. Like seeing someone he’s real familiar with in an unfamiliar context and suddenly not being able to place them, stalled out long seconds with just the itching thought that he should.

 

Edér knows what it looks like, sure: looks like that big godsdamn adra titan under Caed Nua.

 

But trying to connect that with the thing towering over the forest, oblivious to a cloud of frightened birds taking off around it as it looks curiously over its own hands, had made the gears in his head go still a long while before they had finally clicked.

 

They grind out a few more seconds then before they click again:

 

_ It must have crawled up out of the earth. _

 

And again:

 

_ His friends were sitting right on top of it. _

 

That jerks him half a step forward, but then he freezes, rooted to the spot because…

 

Because what can he even do?

 

His stomach sinks down through his feet and on through the crust of the earth, but he stands there slack-jawed and stupid because  _ what can he even do? _

 

That’s beyond him. That’s a day’s walk from head to foot through winding caverns beyond him, last he recalls. It’s at least a mile of living, moving adra from crown to crack -- and another mile again to the ground -- beyond him. It’s so big, is the thing, and he’s so little, and there’s nothing he can do.

 

And then it turns and looks thoughtfully to the east, scanning the horizon in Edér’s direction.

 

For one wild moment, Edér thinks it looks directly at him.

 

In that moment he sees them for the first time, lit up there on its brow like a literal sign from his literal god. The Dawnstars.

 

And he remembers how the strangeness of the world has a way of making itself his problem.

 

He jerks another step forward, this time intent on not stopping, even though he’s not sure what steps B through X are between getting off the bridge, getting to Caed Nua, and killing that thing one more time for keeps…  _ somehow _ .

 

Just then the Midwife grabs his arm to halt him. Edér starts to jerk it free, but she digs her nails in and whirls a strange look on him just as far off as a hollowborn’s. Through the stuttering thoughts trying to churn their way forward to what he needs to do next, it occurs to him that she brought him here to see this.

 

It occurs to him that his trust that she wasn’t the mundane kind of crazy paid off once already, for better or worse, and that if he’s going to march off sword raised after his god again, maybe he ought to listen to see if she has anything else useful to say first.

 

The Midwife looks him over, her eyes drifting from his face to his feet and back again, searching for something.

 

He sees her better now, which is a strange enough thought, in that he’s not sure what he means by it, or what he was or wasn’t seeing before. He sees the silver streaks in her hair that’s pulled back from her face in a messy braid, and the crow’s feet around her eyes that don’t tell him one way or the other her age. He sees the smudges and fingerprints where small, dirty hands have grabbed at her well-washed apron. Sees the bells tied around her one wrist, and the prayer beads around the other, that he recognizes from the way Giancarlo’s big fingers tend to wear them down.

 

Edér watches her watching him. Even as she scans him, something in her stare looks past him, like she’s peeking out to check the weather through a window that happens to be shaped like Edér. Her brows knit and the lines on her face deepen, and he’s not sure if it’s pity for a doomed man, or what.

 

Another crack like thunder distracts them both, her eyes dragging helplessly back to the northwestern sky, and his own following to see the titan-- to see Eothas taking a step, and another. Toward them, Edér thinks for a terrified second, toward  _ him _ .

 

But... no. No. His trajectory is a straight line due east.

 

On the map in his mind Edér knows that, going straight east from Caed Nua to wherever he’s headed, Eothas will pass them by miles to the north. It’s a cold comfort, with the damage Edér knows with a grim certainty that he’s already done.

 

“The path back from you to the stronghold,” the Midwife says to him, and Edér turns back to her reluctantly. His eyes keep wanting to flick back to Eothas’ calm march. To be fair, hers do the same. “From  _ us _ to the stronghold, and to the ones who keep it... who kept us, and we them, in turn… The path winds back, doubled over again and again, all the times we walked it back and forth. But there, at the end, where he left it off last, it… it  _ stretches _ ...

 

“Between the stronghold, and the god that’s rebirthed from it,” she clarifies, for a certain value of clarity.

 

Edér squints. He tries, he really really tries to follow, but he can’t. He doesn’t know what it means. He only trusts that it has to mean something, so he tries instead to commit it to memory in case it starts to make sense later, his mouth moving as he repeats it back under his breath.

 

She speaks faster in a mounting panic, her eyes wide and tracing a line from Eothas to Caed Nua and back again as the god takes long, slow strides that eat up the miles away from the hole in the earth where he started. “His path stretches between, out and out, a line like-- like a spider’s thread, shimmering and strong but growing thinner, taut-- too taut. It will  _ snap _ , it will--!”

 

She gasps, and rips her hand from Edér to slam it over her mouth.

 

There are tears in her eyes as she stares, frozen, at some point between Eothas and Caed Nua, her lips pulled inward in a thin line behind her fingers like she’s trying to pen something in behind them.

 

Edér realizes, when she slowly drags her watery gaze back to him, that he’s been holding his breath again.

 

The Midwife’s mouth moves silently for several seconds. Her eyes focus sharply for the first time he’s ever seen.

 

They look directly into his with a deadly clarity.

 

“... You ought to take a horse.”


	3. those left behind

There is a depth of loss which the Steward cannot yet process. Centuries and generations, all her life's work, her passion.

 

It is too much to plumb just yet with the embers of the Brighthollow fire still burning in the wreckage. She'll need time to truly appreciate the magnitude of her heartbreak.

 

In the meanwhile, she has work to do yet to occupy her mind. She strains to shift fractured stone and soil over the unattended hearth and smothers the fire before it can catch, then turns her attention to the girl.

 

“Leave it for now, my dear,” the Steward whispers to her charge. “He's alive and well, barely injured even. We'll dig him out when he wakes.”

 

Vela gives up scrabbling at the rubble half-encasing her grandfather and sits hard on the ground, sniffling.

 

There'd been a great deal happening at once when it all… well. When it Happened. Even so, the Steward had sensed amidst the chaos an explosion of power inside the chapel, a holy barrier as vibrant as the sun.

 

It had lasted only minutes, but it was enough. Enough to protect the priest and the child from the fist crushing the building around them like crumpling paper and then tossing it carelessly aside -- and a little longer still, to shield them from the pull of the adra that had swept so many other souls free of their shells.

 

Channeling such enormous divine power for even those few minutes must have been a monumental exertion. The priest -- Giancarlo -- survived it, but he now lies unmoving in the chapel's remains, and though the Steward can feel that he is whole and breathing strong it leaves none but the her to tend the girl until he rises.

 

The Steward does not reflect on the absence of Vela's father, the master of their broken fortress. Another loss she cannot yet bring herself to contemplate. A lesser one, says a selfish part of her that mourns the old halls more deeply, but felt keenly nonetheless. Lesser only as a measure of how greatly she loved Caed Nua, not how little she loved its Lord.

 

She can still feel him breathing where he lies, and yet... no. There's nothing the Steward can do for that now, not alone.

 

Better that she distracts the girl from looking for him, too.

 

“Are you hurt?” the Steward asks. Vela favors her hands tenderly, likely scraped on the debris, but she sniffles again and gamely shakes her head at the disembodied voice, wiping them off on her breeches.

 

“Brave girl. But we should tend it and see it does not fester.”

 

The Steward stretches her awareness across the grounds. They'll need to find her safe food and water, medicine for her hands. Construct a reasonable shelter against the fat drops of rain that are slowly pattering down.

 

Certainly it won't be long before someone comes looking; the titan must have been visible from Gilded Vale to Eir Glanfath, and though the farmers and settlers scattered about Yenwood are unlikely to come calling for some days after the scare it must have given them, they’ve still scouts on the roads who will likely be returning in a hurry now, and allies yet farther who’ll be invested in what’s happened. All the same, doing what they can for themselves while they wait will keep them both occupied.

 

At least the rain is good for one thing: at the lightest touch of it, one by one, the ash husks of the guards and the servants crumble into the shapeless heaps on the lawn. It will be easier to direct Vela to the things she needs without having to guide her away from seeing them.

 

“Can you stand?”

 

“Yes, miss,” Vela mumbles, and clambers to her feet.

 

“That's a brave girl, very good. Now turn around. Do you see the clear path to Brighthollow, around the artificer's hall?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Go that way, and watch where you put your feet. I'll move the larger obstructions out of your path, but see you don't twist your ankle in the debris. And-- and go slowly, dearest. The ground may still be unstable, so mind if it feels too soft under you.”

 

The chapel and the eastern barbican had the worst of it when the titan rose up from beneath them, and the bulk of the yawning hole it left when it exhumed itself lies in the southern road. Still, the tremors had torn up much of the bailey and sundered the foundations of the entire stronghold.

 

It's sheer luck that the thing had tossed the girl and her grandfather into the forum, rather than dropping them down the length of the Endless Paths. But the unsettled earth could buckle still if they don't mind where she steps.

 

Slowly, the Steward guides the child to the remains of the manor the long way around, keeping wary of every vibration -- even as she surreptitiously rearranges the crumbled west wall of the keep to obstruct Vela's view. She can't have her seeing the man lying sprawled there, upon the splinters of the once great double doors.

 

Perhaps there's something they can do for him yet, as long as he breathes, but not just now. Not alone.

 

Much of the laboratory is in shambles and the Steward directs her to wait patiently on the grass and not go near the dross, spattered as it is with volatile concoctions. Instead, with great care, the Steward finds and excavates an intact bottle of unguent, by shuffling it gingerly through the pile with the tedious movements of a single brick at a time.

 

At last it emerges and tinks softly into the grass, and Vela picks it up with careful fingers.

 

“It will sting a little, but you must be brave a bit longer, dear. Just a few drops will do, and rub it in thoroughly,” she tells Vela, who obeys in solemn silence.

 

It's been only an hour since the titan marched away by the Steward's estimation. They may have a wait ahead of them, isolated as they are, providing it's not bandits who come poking around first. She'll have to pray that's not the case.

 

The rains come down a little faster.

 

With great effort the Steward shifts two fallen rafter beams from the artificer's hall, and braces them against what still stands of its northeastern wall. It takes some doing to shimmy the surfaces of a pair of tables across the beams and form a lean-to, but she's satisfied when it's done that it will keep the elements out well enough for now.

 

She rights an upside-down watering bucket with the nudging of a splintered beam, and leaves it to catch the rain.

 

“Tell me, my heart, have you ever heard the tale of the Kamoa warriors?” the Steward asks.

 

Vela shakes her head, shivering in her little shelter with a fallen slab of limestone for a seat. “Who's that?”

 

The Steward recites the verses she must have heard dozens of times, chanted lovely and deep in the main hall and echoing up from the Endless Paths. She herself was never much of a singer, but she tries her best.

 

Vela has ever favored stories of battle and valor, and it entrances her for a time.

 

When the rain lightens to a drizzle again, Vela wanders to the garden, and the Steward instructs her on which plants are safe to eat. She'd never been much for the woods in life, either, but she recites from overheard conversations between a cunning Naasitaq huntress and a wily autumn orlan who once wandered her halls.

 

The night's gone dark and cold when she feels a tiny movement in the ruins of the chapel.

 

She pauses her halting recitation of the tale of Wengridh, and waits to feel it again.

 

“What's wrong?” mumbles Vela. Belly full of berries and rainwater, she nods under her lean-to but won't go to sleep despite the Steward's best efforts to lull her.

 

“I think... ah...” The Steward hesitates to answer, reluctant to excite her over nothing. But then another movement, stronger this time, and another. Feebly -- but growing more insistent -- the priest stirs. The Steward feels the grate of his horns against stone as he shifts his head, turning his eyeless gaze about at his situation.

 

“I think your grandfather is awake, my darling.”

 

Sleepy as she may have been moments ago, the girl is up like a shot, stumbling back along the safe path to him and calling “Grandpa? Grandpa?” across the bailey.

 

“Here,” he wheezes, then draws a deep breath as the Steward heaves her strength against the bricks weighing him down. “Here,” he says again, booming voice returning to him by inches.

 

“I'm sorry, dear,” the Steward soothes, as she strains to help him extricate himself. “It’s a sight more difficult to move the detritus, and I feared to jostle you while you were unconscious.”

 

“Hrnh,” he answers, ever the eloquent gentleman, as Vela comes skidding to him across the wet grass. “Hold,” Giancarlo stops her with a commanding cough when she tries to reach for the rubble surrounding him, then rasps more gently: “I'll manage.”

 

It takes a few minutes and the combined efforts of Steward and priest alike to free him. He stumbles to his knees on the soaked earth, then sits on his rear, showing every one of his aches and every bit of his exhaustion. But as ever there's a sturdiness about him greater than the battlement walls, even as Vela barrels into his lap squeezes a pained breath out of him.

 

Giancarlo gingerly peels her off of himself, and grips the babbling child carefully by the shoulders as he looks her over at arm’s length.

 

“She’s unharmed, but for some minor booboos,” the Steward volunteers. “I’ve seen her fed and sheltered.”

 

He nods, makes an appreciative grunt, and pulls Vela back against his chest.

 

Perhaps it’s the stress of the last few hours peaking in waves as the poor girl processes it all on her own time. Perhaps she’d secretly feared the Steward had lied about his health to placate her, and seeing him alive broke open the fear she’d penned in behind a brave face. Whatever the reason, Vela is sobbing again all at once, face buried in her grandfather’s vestments.

 

“I’m right here,” Giancarlo mutters gently.

 

They wait out Vela’s crying in silence. Her sobs grow louder, then softer, then louder again as a new wave of whatever she’s feeling overwhelms her, and finally peter off in the comfort of her grandfather’s embrace.

 

He strokes her back absently and surveys the damage around them with an inscrutable gaze, quiet a long time after Vela begins to calm. It is a heavier silence than his usual.

 

If the Steward drew breath, she’d hold it. She’s not prepared for the question she’s certain is coming as he scans the bailey once more, nor altogether certain how to answer it.

 

After a time, Giancarlo draws a deep breath and sighs. “How long have I been out?” he grumbles.

 

Relieved, the Steward answers, “Three hours, give or take. I’m rather surprised none of our scouts have checked in yet, after the… everything,” she continues as he pushes laboriously to his feet, Vela tucked against his side like a delicate parcel, beneath his cloak to keep the ongoing rain at bay. “Perhaps they’re farther afield than I’d credited, or else reconnoitering from a cautious distance. Who could blame them, I suppose? They mightn’t even think there’s anyone left to report to.”   
  


“Is there?” Giancarlo asks calmly after a brief pause, glancing toward the keep. There’s a tone to it, something pointed, that tells her he does not mean in general -- that he knows, and she knows, who in particular he is enquiring after, though they’d both spare Vela to hear it.

 

“That is… something we need to discuss. I can show you, but I think Vela should remain at the shelter I made for her in the meanwhile.”

 

“Noo,” Vela whines from of his thick woolen cloak. “I don’t want to, it’s cold and wet and I hate it. Can’t you just carry me? I like it here.”

 

“Where is this shelter?” Giancarlo asks, already limping tenderly down the clearest path away from the chapel.

 

“Nooo!”

 

“Around behind the artificer’s hall--”   
  
“Noooooo!”

 

“Shush, child,” Giancarlo tells her, in a voice that is not unkind, but brooks no further argument.

 

Though Vela pouts angrily the priest leaves her under the lean-to, wrapped up in his cloak, and strides slowly toward the keep on the Steward’s instruction.

 

There he stands, arms hanging neutral at his sides, and stares down in silence at the fallen lord of the fallen castle.

 

The Steward cannot see all that happens in her Caed Nua, in the sense that ‘see’ is not the correct word for how she perceives the better part of it. She feels, down to many fine details, the shifts of movement, the state and quality of things.

 

She knows gold from silver in one of her rooms, though she cannot see its color. She feels the divots in the stones where feet most often tread, the wear on velvet curtains from being drawn open and closed and open again, the bruises of a guard mending up in the barracks from a well-fended raid. She senses the shapes of the bodies pacing her halls and knows whose eyes trace their trappings in wonder and whose fingers twitch greedily at their sides. But all that she can  _ see,  _ in the way she experienced sight in life, is what lies plainly before the eyes of her stone housing.

 

From the place where she has fallen to the floor of the keep, she has seen clear through the gaping door to where her master has lain motionless for hours.

 

It has been too difficult a sight to linger on, and so she hasn’t until now. Now, when she sees also the way Giancarlo stands over him, black garments gone gray with dust, the way he stares down with a face as unreadable as her own.

 

She wonders what it looks like to him. It makes her acknowledge what it looks like to her.

 

Lord Trahaearn Rosema has always been a small man, thin and sleek and angular, for all that he’s tall for an elf. Nonetheless, the way he’s carried on -- sweeping grandly from room to room, suffusing the whole keep with a confident energy and reveling in the curious eyes of visitors upon his strange, death-kissed face -- he has always seemed so much larger than his lanky frame.

 

(“Svelte,” he’d call it.)

 

He has certainly never looked so small and frail as he does now, crumpled in an unnaturally still repose upon the lawn, his breaths shallow and slow.

 

“It took the souls of all the staff,” the Steward tells Giancarlo quietly, as he kneels painfully beside Trahaearn.

 

Giancarlo nods, as if it were a given. He gently turns Trahaearn over onto his back, wipes mud from his cheek, and stares.

 

The Steward waits for the familiar slackening of his form as he takes in Trahaearn’s face, for Giancarlo, too, is a Watcher, and she knows well what one looks like when one is Watching. Something left the Lord’s body, but he breathes still -- perhaps something remains that the priest can suss out, if he peers through the veil. Perhaps he can see what is the problem, and find a way to fix it, or a place to start trying.

 

Minutes creep by with only the soft patter of the rain in the eerie silence of the darkened keep. In the distance, beyond the shattered battlements and far on the outermost edge of her awareness, she feels the two-beat thump of hooves trotting up the southern road.

 

Giancarlo drops his chin ponderously into his hand, thinking thoughts he does not deign to share. But he does not peer into Trahaearn’s soul. Slowly, the Steward realizes why, but she’s not certain yet what to make of that, what to do with it, what it means for her and for them and for everyone.

 

There is simply nothing there for Giancarlo to Watch.


	4. we regret to inform you...

“What's the right way to start a letter to a gréf's son?” Edér asks the man lying on the other side of the cabin. “Never written to nobility before.

 

“Think your brother Addie’ll be mad if I use the wrong, uuuh… terms of address?” he goes on. “Only met him the one time, but he didn't strike me as the type, so...”

 

His companion, of course, doesn't answer.

 

Edér turns back to the writing desk, leaning against another sway of the storm-tossed ship, and scribbles down “Dear Aedelric” at the top of his fifth parchment, hoping that's alright.

 

The Steward clears her throat apologetically. “It would be ‘My Lord Aedelric’, or ‘Dear Lord Aedelric’,” she informs him. “The surname being optional.”

 

Edér points at her by way of thanks, and crosses it out.

 

It’s strange how no matter how old or experienced you get, the minute you have to step out of your routine and do things you’ve never done before you go right back to feeling helpless and clueless as a lost child. Right back to feeling like you did at your first temple service where everyone in the room knew the words and gestures except you, or your first embarrassing tumble in the hay that you wished for years after you could throw in the sea and let the memory be Ondra’s problem.

 

Edér has never sailed. He’s never planned a voyage, never budgeted out a fortune in coppers, never chartered a ship, never hired a crew, never stocked a hold. He’s barely ever left the Dyrwood.

 

Granted, he’s done a lot of weirder shit in the past six years. Talked to gods, seen the ghosts of long-dead dwarves, jumped down a hole as long as his life twice over and lived to tell no one, if only because no one would believe him if he even knew how to explain.

 

Despite all that, somehow in the blur between Caed Nua and the Defiant’s cabin, Edér has found that every few minutes he feels like he has no idea what he’s doing, or whether he should be doing something else right now, or if he’s doing what he’s doing wrong some way.

 

He looks up from the letter he’s been trying to compose for an hour, at the man laid out on the ratty little berth.

 

Tray would know what he was doing, if he were awake

 

He’d do it all with that high-born grace of his, six different tricks up his sleeve, and a little I-know-something-you-don’t smirk, and Edér could just follow his lead like he always had before.

 

Privately, Edér thinks he would trade a lot of things to go back to the days when the Watcher kept him awake with all the convulsions and the crazy gibberish that hissed out of him in his sleep. It’d scared the shit out of him, sure; all those times he’d shaken a whole five minutes’ worth of hell out of Tray before the guy finally woke up, Edér had worked his guts into knots thinking this time would be the time that he wouldn't, because he wasn’t really asleep -- he’d just finally went and lost his whole damn mind when they weren’t looking after him close enough.

 

In hindsight, maybe that wasn’t as scary as him sleeping still and quiet like. Now Edér finds himself kept awake by looking over every five minutes just to watch and make sure Tray’s still breathing.

 

It’s just the three of them in the cabin for now. He and Giancarlo have been switching off shifts beside the Steward, keeping watch on their precious cargo and his long, long beauty nap. They’ve mostly kept Vela out, used the crew they’d hired to keep her distracted by showing her how the ship works and giving her light chores, until she’s too pooped to object to her gramps tucking her into her own hammock.

 

It’d been too much, that first night, seeing her try and cuddle up hopelessly by her dad’s side.

 

Giancarlo says his soul is gone, even though he’s still breathing. Like the bîaŵac “survivor” they’d seen at a demonstration in the Brackenbury Sanitarium. Like a hollowborn.

 

Tray’s died. His body just ain’t figured it out yet.

 

The Steward says she can feel the missing bits of him, seeing as how he’s still technically the Lord of Caed Nua -- for all that’s worth, Caed Nua being just a real impressive jumble of rocks beside a real deep hole in the ground. But she says she felt him leave, like he went and marched off beside Edér’s god into the sea.

 

Which is a lot like what Woden went and did, except Tray didn’t choose to enlist.

 

Edér’s not sure how he’ll get Tray back from wherever Eothas is leading him any more than he did his brother. He’s for  _ damn sure _ not sure why Eothas is back to doing things he’d never dreamed his god could do, back when he was a bright-eyed boy standing in the temple at Gilded Vale with a faith too big for his heart. But just the same he’s gone and donned the very armor he’d expected to die in 20 years ago, 6 years ago, and he’s run off to try and set it right again.

 

Above all else, Edér’s just not sure how he’ll manage that without an army, a Godhammer, or Tray.

 

But one thing he knows for certain, it’s better than sitting at home in Dyrford and counting his losses like bodies on a hanging tree until he lays down and dies.

 

He also knows that if he were the one getting the news through the grapevine that Woden's whole house had been smashed to kindling, he'd like for someone to tell him what became of his brother. Hence why he's writing Aedelric, despite ol’ Addie being a big important Lord and Edér being a farmer who only barely learned his letters out of a beaten old scripture book.

 

Someone ought to tell him. Edér would want someone to tell him, if it was him.

 

And so Edér's telling him, best he can, because he feels responsible -- seeing as it was his god, and his friend, and seeing how his throat closes up with empathy when he thinks about Addie worrying not knowing.

 

_ Dear Aedelric, _

 

_ Dear LORD Aedelric, _

 

_ My name is Edér Teylecg. I do not know if you Remember me but we met the One time when you came down to caed nua. I am your Brother’s friend. _

 

_ Now, you have probably been Hearing about a God stomping on the keep and sucking up All the Souls of everybody Who Was there. And That is true. But I am righting this to tell you that Tray Lord Trahaearn is alive. _

 

_ He is not doing well, but we Have him with us. We are Taking him to the dead fire, to Try and _

 

For all his effort to keep his hand steady, a wave that sends the ship bucking like an ornery mare scrapes the quill across the page and leaves a thick black line of ink. Edér swears, but there’s no heat in it. He still hasn’t figured out how to end that sentence anyway.

 

“I fear the storm is growing more violent, Master Teylecg,” the Steward informs him.

 

“You really figure?” he gripes, setting aside the paper and quill. “Sorry,” Edér adds, feeling guilty at once. Steward’s a nice lady and doesn’t deserve him snapping. He’s just tired.

 

“No harm done.” Her tone disagrees but he doesn’t blame her. After what they’ve been through, she’s probably tired too, skin or no skin. Everyone’s on edge.

 

He turns his chair around to face her and Tray, pulls his pipe and matches out of his pocket and tries three times to strike one and aim it proper into the bowl.

 

After giving him time to accomplish all that -- probably sick of his attitude -- the Steward sighs. “We ought to have sailed around,” she says, and it ain’t the first time they’ve had this argument.

 

“We gotta make the straightest line to Eothas,” Edér gestures with his pipe toward Tray’s body, smoke puffing out of his mouth on every word. “You seen how he was by the time we pushed off from Defiance Bay. Thought his heart would just stop beating.

 

“I don’t know what happens if we lose too much ground on a detour, and I ain’t fixing to find out. Not after we come this far already.”

 

“We’ll be no good to anyone if these waves capsize the Defiant. It will all have been for naught.” He can almost feel the Steward looking at him, even though her statue (or... just a bust now, he supposes) stares dead ahead at the wall. Always was fond of it; he knows it wasn’t carved to look like her, and she probably looked completely different when she had a body and all, but it suits her. “Or perhaps you mean to swim to shore, should it come to that? Drag Lord Rosema and Vela behind you through sheer grit and bullheadedness?”

 

Above them, a sailor shouts to another over the wind and crashing water. Edér clamps his teeth around the stem of his pipe and flashes them at her in a tired grin. “Carried ‘im through worse before.”

 

“As you say. I’ll send my regards and well wishes from the seafloor, then.”

 

“Listen, we’ll make it through.” Edér feels the bravado leave him as he goes on; he doesn’t really believe himself like he wishes he did, but it’s worth the effort to try. “So far I figure our luck likes to swing like hard one way and then the other just to keep us on our toes. Got stepped on by a god, maybe we’re due a miracle or two in this storm.”

 

“I do hope you’re right, Master Teylecg,” the Steward says, sounding just as exhausted as he feels. “I suspect we’ve no choice but to wait and find out -- at any rate, it’s too late to go back.”

 

There’s another shout, and another. A whole chorus of them; the whole crew on the deck above starts to hollering at once, and Edér strains to listen. Doesn’t like the sound of that at all.

 

“Oh dear.”

 

“Guess this is where we find out we’re sinking, huh? Glad we didn’t put a wager on it. Dunno what you’d do with the coppers, though...”

 

“No…” The Steward hesitates. “No. I cannot feel the ship keenly as I could Caed Nua, but I feel enough. We’re whole and afloat. They’ve spotted something.”

 

Eothas, is Edér’s first thought. They must have spotted Eothas.

 

The shouting gets louder, more panicked, and sets Edér’s teeth on edge. He grips the arm of his chair. He’ll have to go topside and see for himself.

 

He looks to Tray, to see if he looks any stronger. Tough to tell; Tray’s skin is no more or less grey than it ever was, and certainly not getting any rosier. He just lies there like he’s done for days, breathing slow as the ship bucks and dips on the waves. Could almost mistake him for just having a real good, deep sleep, if he weren’t so still.

 

Edér doesn’t want to leave him alone in here -- at least, not alone with someone who can’t grab him if the storm gets worse and threatens to toss him around.

 

Doesn’t want to leave him in case he just… dies. Really dies, like. For keeps.

 

Edér struggles to swallow down the lump in his throat as he thinks on that, still glued to his chair. He doesn’t want to not be there for another death, doesn’t want someone else he cares about passing away alone and he wasn’t there for him.

 

He might have to risk it. Over his head, feet are pounding back and forth across the deck in a hurry.

 

He’s going to have to risk it. He’s made up his mind.

 

And then, without warning, Tray sits up.


End file.
